Ex-Rocker Finds a Different Path to Fame, Chanting All the Way

Krishna Das, once known as Jeff Kagel, in Times Square on Tuesday.Credit Earl Wilson/The New York Times

Updated, Sept. 14 | In June 1967, a small group of high school and college students on Long Island formed a rock band that would eventually become Blue Öyster Cult.

For a brief time, Jeff Kagel, then a student at State University of New York at Stony Brook, was the band’s lead singer. Then he quit.

“I was brutally unhappy,” he recalled of that time, before the band even had its first name, Soft White Underbelly. “Even though my childhood dream was to be in a band, and that dream was handed to me, I had already come into contact with something else that I could not turn away from. I had already found a connection to finding real happiness in the world.”

The downtrodden young man who quit the band nearly a half-century ago is still performing — but not as Jeff Kagel, and not at rock concerts.

In following a different path, Mr. Kagel still managed to become a star, singing with Sting and rubbing shoulders with Madonna. And on Thursday night, Mr. Kagel will be at Lincoln Center for a screening of a documentary about his life in which he has emerged as a celebrity in the world of yoga.

Photo

Krishna Das in India playing an ektara in a family photo from the mid-'70s.Credit

Mr. Kagel’s journey began years ago when, intrigued by Buddhism and Hinduism, he traveled to India.

He changed his name to Krishna Das and became the best-known American singer of the Indian devotional music called kirtan, which involves chanting the names of God. One yoga magazine described him as the Pavarotti of kirtan.

“I think Springsteen heals a lot of hearts, I think he lifts people’s spirits the way many other artists do,” said Krishna Das, now a divorced, 65-year-old grandfather living in Nyack, N.Y. “But the real difference is that these chants help each individual connect to a deeper place in their own hearts.”

The 72-minute documentary, “One Track Heart: The Story of Krishna Das,’’ which was directed by Jeremy Frindel, finds Krishna Das in the foothills of the Himalayas, where he lived in the early 1970s and learned to chant and play an accordionlike organ called a harmonium.

Krishna Das’s chanting has won him legions of fans in the United States and around the world.

“My chanting isn’t some new-age kind of thing,” he said. “This is an ancient practice that I absorbed when I lived in India. It has become my meditation practice, it has helped me overcome depression, self-loathing, even a cocaine addiction.”

And it has launched an unlikely career.

“Honestly, I could never have seen this coming,” he said. “But there’s so much anxiety these days, so much fear in our lives about money, politics and war that you can’t breathe. It’s so tense that people are trying to find ways to relax and gather inner strength to deal with these difficult situations, and so they chant, which is a very easy thing to do and yet very powerful.”

Though he cannot claim to have contributed to such Blue Öyster Cult classics as “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” and “Godzilla,” Krishna Das has become a major figure in a more spiritual orbit, producing 12 albums in his career, including “Pilgrim Heart,” which sold more than 50,000 copies. One of his yoga students was Madonna.

Speaking of his old bandmates, namely the guitarists Donald Roeser, who is still a member of Blue Öyster Cult, and John Wiesenthal, a former classmate at Stony Brook who said he started the band but left it in the late 1960s, Krishna Das said: “I haven’t been in touch with those guys in 40 or 50 years.

“I don’t think they know me at all, I’m not in their world,” he said. “I’m famous in a very small pond and they are part of a much bigger picture, but that’s O.K.”

Mr. Wiesenthal, now 67 and a guitar instructor at Hochstein School of Music and Dance in Rochester, said he had lost touch with his old bandmate until five years ago when he noticed a familiar face while flipping through the pages of a guitar magazine.

“There was a picture of Krishna Das, who to me, will always be Jeff Kagel,” Mr. Wiesenthal said. “I wasn’t really surprised because Jeff always had a strong pull toward that lifestyle. He was more capable of accepting faith than I was.”

His old band mate, Mr. Wiesenthal added, was also a talented musician.

“He had a lot of magnetism, great guitar skill and a real rhythmic truth that enabled him to take hold of an audience,’’ he said.

Mr. Roeser also had fond recollections.

“The time we knew Jeff Kagel was loose, experimental and lots of fun,” he wrote in an e-mail. “We all thought we’d wind up going somewhere, and we all did, as it turned out.”

Krishna Das said he is having as much fun today as Jeff Kagel had nearly a half-century ago.

“Look at me now, man, I’m still doing the concert thing,” he said. “I still get the same love and I get to sing along with thousands of people all around the world, and I can do it while I’m sitting down, for goodness sake. I don’t have to run around and look stupid.”

Correction: September 14, 2012Because of an editing error, the City Room column in some editions on Thursday about Krishna Das, formerly known as Jeff Kagel and a singer of Indian devotional music, carried an erroneous byline. The column was by Vincent M. Mallozzi, not by Corey Kilgannon.

What's Next

Looking for New York Today?

New York Today is still going strong! Though no longer on City Room, New York Today continues to appear every weekday morning, offering a roundup of news and events for the city. You can find the latest New York Today at nytoday.com or in the morning, on The New York Times homepage or its New York section. You can also receive it via email.

Lookin for Metropolitan Diary?

Metropolitan Diary continues to publish! Since 1976, Metropolitan Diary has been a place for New Yorkers, past and present, to share odd fleeting moments in the city. We will continue to publish one item each weekday morning and a round-up in Monday's print edition. You can find the latest entries at nytimes.com/diary and on our New York section online.

About

City Room®, a news blog of live reporting, features and reader conversations about New York City, has been archived. Send questions or suggestions by e-mail.